Subject: Re: [EL] WaPo op-ed on transparency
From: Jon Roland
Date: 4/1/2011, 4:42 PM
To: "election-law@mailman.lls.edu" <election-law@mailman.lls.edu>
Reply-to:
"jon.roland@constitution.org"

That is too broad a definition to admit of rational legal intervention. It really encompasses the entire range of rent-seeking behavior in public-choice, for which electoral results comprise only one phase, and likely not the most important one. What seems to be envisioned requires a level and quality of civic virtue that has voters seeking and paying for political information, which may have prevailed in the Early Republic but has since been displaced by "rational ignorance". As long as voters opt for ignorance there is no solution in any kind of intervention in campaign finance. The solution then is to abandon elections and go to a system of sortition, in which almost all public decisions are made by systems of randomly selected juries, which take people out of their private lives and compel them to do nothing for a period of service except focus on making a structured set of decisions, including perhaps how to pose the questions for a different jury. If you insist on elections, then voting needs to be made a kind of militia duty, with citizens being compelled to do nothing  but study issues intensely, with penalties for not learning thoroughly. Somehow I doubt that would be popular.

On 04/01/2011 06:01 PM, Paul Lehto wrote: 
"what is undue influence?"  My answer is that, from
the standpoint of the law of democracy and of free peoples exercising
self-government, undue influence is that which alters the terrain of
public discourse to defeat the overarching cause of an informed,
balanced electoral decision.
  
-- Jon

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